]]>They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but this may be stretching the expression a bit too far. Cut the Birds, a game released five days ago in the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) App Store, has copied the birds from Rovio’s Angry Birds and the gameplay from Halfbrick’s Fruit Ninja. The resulting app — a “blatant rip-off,” in the words of Rovio’s Mighty Eagle Peter Vesterbacka — is currently ranks as the most popular free app in the Apple App Store.

A version of the game was also released for the Android Market on October 16. It is also free.

The idea of Cut the Birds is very basic: the player chops birds flying across the screen with a swiping motion before they “hit” the glass, avoiding bombs that look a lot like the birds. The game, at least in the current version, increases in difficulty with more and faster birds. No advertising or any other revenue options are available in the current iteration.

There are many other apps and games that play on and borrow from the fame of Rovio’s original creation, which itself has spawned many of its own official games, and a very large merchandising franchise to boot (the latest: a cookbook).

The difference here is that the birds look like they’ve been lifted directly from the original Rovio game, and the challenge itself from Halfbrick’s original. And you could even argue that the name borrows from the best-selling Cut the Rope, made by a third developer, Chillingo.

As the blog GamePro points out, copying is fairly common in the world of gaming apps. Still, it’s not often that the product of that copying goes straight to the top of the charts.

Solverlabs is a Ukraine-based software developer that has created other games — including at least one other that lifts from Fruit Ninja, the Fruits and Ninja app for BlackBerry App World. That is selling for $0.99. The company also works on enterprise services, listing three different U.S.-based companies among their clients.

Vesterbacka tells paidContent that the app is a “blatant rip-off” but it’s not clear whether Rovio can or will do any more than say that.

We have reached out to both Rovio and Halfbrick, as well as Solverlabs, for further response, but for now, the biggest outcry seems to have come from customers. Even though the game is getting downloaded by the masses, a fair number of of them are also getting fairly loud in their copying accusations, too, via the comments on the App Store page for the app.

It may be that it’s too difficult to try to chase the developer down, but as Om Malik points out, it’s surprising that the games got published in the stores to begin with, and haven’t yet been removed.

]]>It looks like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has passed another milestone in its march on the mobile industry. Three players in the app ecosystem have crunched some figures, and claim that Apple has now approved 500,000 apps for the iOS platform in 34 months since the App Store was launched. A long, but interesting infographic charts apps’ progress over that time:

The data — compiled by analytics company Chomp, blog 148apps.com and games developer Chillingo — has not been confirmed officially by Apple. We have contacted the company and will update with any response later. Apple has been in touch to confirm the last figure it publicly released: 350,000, so you might want to take the 500,000 figure with that grain of salt.

Today, there are around 400,000 apps available in Apple’s App Store — the lower number, writes Fortune, is due to “attritition, replacement and withdrawal”. The half-million milestone was reached around midnight on Tuesday.

In January, Apple said that some 10 billion apps had been downloaded from the App Store, a number that is likely to get updated at the Apple WWDC event in June.

Worth noting that Apple today is still the market leader when it comes to apps, although Google’s Android Market is giving it a run for its money — at least where app numbers are concerned; profitability is another question (Apple has cornered the market on that, at least where devices are concerned).

Distimo notes that today the Market already has more free apps than the App Store — 134,342 compared to 121,845 — and predicts that by September of this year the Android Market will surpass the App Store in terms of number of apps.

But that’s a number to revisit in September. Today, we can, unofficially, celebrate the half-million mark on iOS, complete with timeline of key events and best-sellers:

]]>The number of apps approved for Apple’s iOS platform has exceeded 500,000 apps according to data collected by app discovery service 148apps, mobile gaming company, Chillingo and San Francisco-based app discovery company, Chomp. Currently, the Apple App Store has 400,000 apps available for download. Nearly 36 percent of all apps are free. Average paid app costs $3.64 per app. It would cost $891,982.24 to download all apps.

It was just a little while ago we were hailing the mobile game Angry Birds as the Next Big Entertainment Franchise, given the frenzy of interest in playing the addictive iPhone game. But the mantle is being passed to ZeptoLabs’ Cut the Rope, a clever new physics-based puzzle game that has replaced Angry Birds on the top of the App Store charts — the game got to 1 million downloads within 10 days on Oct. 14, a record for a paid iOS app.

I recently caught up with Semyon Voinov, creative director for Moscow-based ZeptoLab, a small team of five developers with plenty of mobile experience. Voinov said he was floored by the response to Cut the Rope, which launched earlier this month and within 48 hours zoomed to No. 1 in the U.S. and several other countries. An iPhone version sells for 99 cents while an iPad version goes for $1.99.

Voinov said the company is planning to release an Android version next, although ZeptoLabs has so far only done some early research into such a project. “That’s definitely the question we get most,” Voinov said. “Android will be our next big milestone.” More immediately, the company plans on fixing bugs, adding new levels and addressing consumer requests for additional Cut the Rope features, such as support for the iPhone 4’s retina display.

ZeptoLab’s success highlights the incredible momentum behind mobile gaming, which is heating up the mergers and acquisition markets. ZeptoLab’s UK-based publisher Chillingo was just acquired by Electronic Arts on Wednesday for a rumored $20 million, and last week, Japanese social gaming platform DeNA bought mobile game maker Ngmoco for $400 million. Voinov said the moves reflect how big mobile games have become and he said the EA acquisition may convince ZeptoLab to stay with Chillingo because of the added visibility the EA pairing might provide for future games.

Voinov said the idea for Cut the Rope came from the development of a previous title called Parachute Ninja, which originally had a rope-swinging mechanism that was later dropped because it was too complicated. The team recycled the rope-physics engine and took inspiration from others physics-based games like Angry Birds (7 million paid downloads to date) and Ragdoll Blaster. They ended up creating a game around a baby monster called Om Nom that needs to be fed by cutting ropes that suspend candy over the animal. “After Angry Birds, we understood having cute characters was a factor for their success,” said Voinov. “Feeding a character that acts and looks like a baby, it feeds our parental instinct.”

It’s unclear if ZeptoLab will pursue some of the Hollywood deals that Rovio is seeking for its Angry Birds title, but the company said it is considering selling OmNom dolls. Voinov said ZeptoLab is also very interested in considering a freemium model for upcoming games. He said the mobile developer world has changed rapidly since the advent of the iPhone and the App Store, by creating a level playing field that allows a small team like ZeptoLab to succeed.

While Voinov won’t discuss revenue, he said the game has paid off its development costs. “With traditional mobile games you have to negotiate with the operators to get on the deck and you have to localize it and port it to many devices, hundreds of them,” Voinov said. “Creating a mobile game and getting some money out of it is much more complicated than with the iPhone.”

While Chillingo has found enormous success with the release of Angry Birds from developer Rovio, and more recently Zeptolab’s Cut the Rope, which sold 1 million units in its first week, the deal for Chillingo will not include those developers as Chillingo only distributes those games. What EA — already the one of the top publishers on iOS — gets is Chillingo’s ability to sniff out upcoming titles like Cut the Rope and access to a wide variety of mobile games. In addition to its titles, Chillingo operates Crystal, a social gaming platform that ties users of different games together into one community.

“By acquiring Chillingo, EA Mobile is increasing its market leadership on the Apple Platform as well as reaffirming its position as the world’s leading wireless entertainment publisher,” EA said in a statement. “This acquisition will combine Chillingo’s expertise in cultivating the ideas of independent developers with EA’s global mobile publishing reach.”

The deal shows that traditional game publishers are increasingly looking to diversify into lower-cost, casual games that are delivered digitally. EA has been talking for some time of getting away from games as a packaged goods business into games as place people go.

The bet on Chillingo shows that mobile social gaming is only going to gain more steam. The divisions we see between social gaming companies operating on platforms like Facebook or the web and mobile gaming companies are going to collapse and will be aided by consolidation, as some of the larger players look to make their titles ubiquitous across platforms.

Separately, I hear from my sources that the deal was still weeks away from being finalized, but the All Things D report kicked things into gear.

]]>Chillingo’s Ravensword ($6.99, iTunes link) is being touted as a Morrowind-type experience for the iPhone. That’s a lot to live up to. A full-fledged action RPG on my diminutive Apple portable seems like a dream come true, if it can actually hold a candle to its console counterparts. That’s a big if.

The iPhone faces control issues and what seems like a natural reticence towards developing lengthy, in-depth game experiences on the iPhone. I say natural because most users still game only casually on the device, since that’s what a phone lends itself to. So does Ravensword manage to pull off an in-depth action RPG gaming experience? Read on to find out.

Graphics and Audio

At least superficially, Ravensword looks like the console and PC games from which it so clearly takes its inspiration. By default, you operate your character from a third-person perspective, and you can switch to first-person. That’s a standard borrowed from the Morrowind series, among others.

It’s a little jarring to see some of the visual effects the game has in store. For example, everyone’s eyes are plastered open all the time, and look painted on and terrifying. Every time your character wakes up after having fallen in battle, I have to suppress a little scream.

Ravensword’s soundtrack and effects sound a little pre-packaged and stock, but they don’t really hurt the experience, and you can always flick the silent switch is the soundtrack becomes too repetitive, as it did for me.

Gameplay

If you’ve ever played any kind of RPG before, the game mechanics of Ravensword will be familiar to you. Basically, you run around killing monsters and get experience for doing so. In most cases, the RPG mechanics are a little more structured and complex than that. In most cases. In Ravensword they are not.

As soon as you venture out beyond the city walls, bad guys appear, and you hit them with whatever you happen to be wielding, then they die and you get experience, or you die and wake up in town. If you kill enough critters, you gain a level, and your stats are increased by a pre-determined amount. No level customization, no skill selection, nothing. To make matters worse, you don’t choose a class/race/gender etc., so you’re stuck as a human warrior whether you like it or not.

Nor is combat challenging. The most you can do is switch between your bow and your sword when killing animals and forest creatures. Otherwise, you just hit the attack button like it’s going out of style. Also, you die a lot early on, since the game design is unbalanced.

Plot

It’s a bad sign when the first thing I have to say about a game’s plot design is to question whether or not it actually has one. To be fair, there is a story lurking somewhere in the background, about a kingdom in denial and a king who’s been missing for three years. Presumably, you’re meant to find out exactly what’s up with all of that nonsense at some point, but after spending quite a bit of time killing rats and warthogs, I just wasn’t convinced that finding out would be worth it.

Verdict

I was perhaps too excited to pick up Ravensword, since it seemed to have a lot of promise as an action RPG for the iPhone, but even if you aren’t expecting much, I’d definitely take a pass on this offering from Chillingo. Dungeon Hunter is a much better experience, and if you’re looking for a Morrowind clone, I’d suggest just waiting a few months since I’m sure Gameloft will get to copying it, too, in due course.